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Removing the maximized windows titlebar can be very useful, especially on netbooks but not only. And if you use the default GNOME SHell theme "Adwaita", you can gain quite a few pixels by doing this.

Method 1: using Maximus

Maximus should be available in your Linux distribution official repositories so search for it in your package manager and install it. Then add it to your startup applications.

By default, Maximus maximizes all the windows so if you want to change that, open gconf-editor, navigate to apps > maximus and enable "no_maximize".

Gconf-Editor is not installed by default in Ubuntu 11.10, so to install it, use the following command:

sudo apt-get install gconf-editor

After installing Maximus, you'll have to log out and log back in.

Method 2: editing the theme

The below instructions are for Adwaita theme but you can of course do this for other themes and will only remove the titlebar for maximized windows.

To remove maximized windows titlebar in GNOME Shell, open "/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml" (firstly make a backup of this file!) as root and search for frame_geometry name="max" and edit it so that it looks like this:

Basically you need to change all the "distance" and "border" values for frame_geometry name="max" to 0 and append has_title="false" to the frame_geometry name="max" line.

Then press ALT + F2 to reload GNOME Shell and you're done.

How to unmaximize windows

Now you need a way to unmaximize windows. You can toggle the maximization state of a window using ALT + F10. You can also unmaximize a window using ALT + F5 or by pressing ALT + SPACE and then selecting a menu item.